What is the world to me! He will condemn
or offend with praise.
My dark path will remain
unsociable and hidden.

There is some eternal and painful riddle in his poetry. It has wondrous music, the secret of which is not given to anyone to unravel.

I am the god of the mysterious world,
The whole world is in my dreams.
I will not create an idol for myself
Neither on earth nor in heaven.

my divine nature
I will not open to anyone.
I work like a slave, but for freedom
I call the night, peace and darkness.

Poet, prose writer, playwright, publicist, Fedor Sologub For more than 40 years of creative activity, he left an extensive literary heritage, numbering dozens of volumes. He had a significant impact on his contemporaries. Treated his work with great respect and sympathy. A. Akhmatova. S. Gorodetsky considered himself his student. O. Mandelstam wrote: " For people of my generation, Sologub was a legend already 20 years ago. We asked ourselves: “Who is this man whose aged voice sounds with such immortal power?»
From memories G. Chulkova: "Sologub could then have been given fifty years or more. However, he was one of those whose age was determined not by decades, but at least by millennia - such ancient human wisdom shone in his ironic eyes."

Zinaida Gippius: « In the face, in the eyes with heavy eyelids, in the whole baggy figure - calm to the point of immobility. A person who could never, under any circumstances, "fuss". The silence was amazing for him. When he spoke, it was a few intelligible words, spoken in a very even voice, almost monotonous, without a hint of haste. His speech is as calm impenetrability as his silence. So he remained in the memory of many: “impenetrably calm, stingy with words, sometimes evil, without a smile, witty. Always a little magician and sorcerer.

Cook's son

The real name of Sologub was Teternikov, but in the editorial office, where he took his first works, he was advised to come up with a pseudonym.
- It is inconvenient for the muse to crown Teternikov's head with laurels.

And then they came up with a more "euphonious name" - Fedor Sologub. With one "l", so as not to be confused with the count writer V. Sollogub.
In terms of his ancestral roots, F. Sologub is not like the other luminaries of symbolism, who came mainly from wealthy social strata. Fedor Teternikov's childhood passed where many of the heroes of his beloved Dostoevsky- at the very bottom of life. He was one of the "cook's children" in the literal sense of the word.

A son was born to a poor man.
An evil old woman entered the hut.
bony hand shaking
Dismantling gray hairs.

Behind the midwife
The old woman reached out to the boy
And suddenly with an ugly hand
Lightly touched his cheek.

Whispering slurred words
She left, banging her stick.
Nobody understood witchcraft.
The years have gone by,

The commandment of the secret words came true:
In the world he met sorrow,
And happiness, joy and love
They fled from the dark sign.

("Fate")

he was born March 1 (old style - February 17), 1863 in Petersburg in the family of a tailor, in the past a serf. At the age of four, he lost his father, who died of consumption, and was raised by his mother, who was left a widow with two children.

Tatyana Semyonovna Teternikova (1832-1894), mother of the writer. 1890s

Fedor grew up in extreme poverty, experienced many difficulties and humiliations. In the rich house of the hostess, where his mother served, he caught some fragmentary knowledge, the rudiments of culture, he often went to the theater, but he taught lessons in the corner of the hall fenced off by a closet, and slept in the kitchen on a chest. The painful atmosphere of a "double life" between masters and servants largely determined the character of the future poet. On the one hand, Fyodor and his sister were almost pupils in the family of a collegiate assessor, where it was customary to play music, attend theaters, the opera, but at the same time, the children of the servant strictly had to know their place.

The mother worked in the sweat of her brow, venting her fatigue and irritation on the children. She was very harsh with them, punished for the slightest offense, beat, flogged with rods. The hero of Sologub's very first poems is a barefoot whipped boy: Like a boy, quickly covered with bees// covered all over, screaming -// the heart groans under the injections// of evil and petty insults". Poems were born as laments in response to insults and insults:

"Whoop, whine, whine!" -
The little one is used to whimpering.

Last time I saw you
You were proud
Who hurt you now
God or hell?

"Whine, whine, whine! -
The little one is accustomed to whimpering.-

Oh, where, wherever you jump,
Everywhere lies.
Anyway, even if you don't want to
You will roar.

Whine, whine, whine!"
The little one is accustomed to whimpering...

F. Sologub in childhood

The experiences of childhood can be judged by the tone and mood of his works, by the fate of the heroes-children, and, apparently, in conversations with loved ones, something broke through that made A. Bely say terrible words after one of these stories: “ I had the feeling that I was being scalded with boiling water ... this is such a horror that it is better not to think about.

Who is that next to me laughing so softly?
Famously my, one-eyed, wild Famously!
Famously attached to me for a long time, from the cradle,
Famously stood near the baptismal font,
Famously following me is a relentless shadow,
Famously put me in the grave.
Famously terrible, the enemy of both love and oblivion,
Who gave you this power?

Lily clings to me, whispers to me softly:
"I am a mediocre, persecuted Likho!
In whose house I find a corner for myself,
Everyone drives me away, not knowing a moment of peace.
Only you can't fight me,
Dreaming strangely, you strive for torment,
That's why I'm so friendly with your soul,
Like an echo with sound."

In "bear corners"

In those days, it was not easy for a person of such origin to “go out to the people”. It must have been difficult for Fyodor Sologub, too. But he got out, got a higher education, became a teacher. For 25 years he taught in county towns, the most remote deaf corners: Sacred, Velikiye Luki, Vytegra. Hence Sologub's knowledge of provincial life.

How much snow has fallen!
Houses are not visible behind the mounds.
But from the snow it's light here,
And in autumn it is dark as in a hole.

Longing and slush, even howl, -
No wonder it's called Vytegra, -
Or pout at cards, drink vodka,
If a penny will start in your pocket.

Vytegra. 1810-1910 years

Poverty was such that Sologub, being a teacher, asked permission from his superiors to go to classes barefoot - there was nothing to buy shoes.

F. Sologub. 1880s

In the village of Kresttsy, the building of the city's 3rd grade school has been preserved, at present school No. 1 is located there.

Poet, prose writer, playwright of the Silver Age, Fyodor Sologub (Teternikov) taught mathematics here.
The house where Sologub lived has also been preserved.

The sacrums at this time, as I wrote A. Chebotarevskaya, « represented a genuine type of “bear corner”, where a field is visible from every house, on dark evenings they walk along the streets with their own lanterns, risking drowning in the impenetrable mud, and shopkeepers receive sausage and canned food once a year.

The sacrums in the 20s

Crosses today

The nightmarish life of provincial county towns with their poverty, drunkenness, dullness and savagery, the impressions from all this later formed the basis of Sologub's novels " hard days" and " petty imp". And he there, according to him, significantly softened the colors ( “there were facts that no one would have believed if they had been described anyway”).
There Sologub began to write poetry, sending them to the editorial offices of the capital with a secret hope and a dream to escape from this backwater.

Sometimes a strange smell will blow, -
Don't understand his reasons
Long faded, foggy day
Experienced again.

Like an old man, you rise sadly again
On a dilapidated porch
You take away the creaky bolt again,
Rotating rusty ring -

And you see cramped chambers,
Where the floorboards creak a little
Where is the damp wallpaper
Softly rustling in the corners

Where the boring pendulum looms
Listening to boring, evil speeches,
Where someone prays and cries
So long crying at night.

Word music magic

Harmony, the music of Sologub's verse makes him related to the most "musical" poet A. Fetom. « I do not know anyone among modern Russian poets whose poems would be closer to music than those of Sologub., - wrote Lev Shestov. - Even when he told the most terrible things - about the executioner, about the howling dog - his poems are full of mysterious and exciting melody. How can you sing about a dog's howl, how can you sing about an executioner? I don’t know, this is the secret of Sologub, even, perhaps, not of Sologub himself, but of his strange Muse».

All these words of yours
I've been tired of it for a long time.
Only if the sky is blue,
Noisy waves yes ate,

Just cling to your feet
The foam of the wild wave,
Sweetly whispering to the shores
Tales of love unprecedented.

Some kind of magic in every thing Sologub, even obviously weak. I. Ehrenburg wrote: " Sologub knew the highest secret of poetry - music. Not Balmont's musicality, but the thrill of rhythm.

foggy day
It's coming
My desired does not go.
Mist around.
On the doorstep
I am standing,
All in anxiety
And I sing.
Where is my friend?

The cold blows
My garden is empty
Orphaned
Every bush.
I'm bored.
said goodbye
You are easy
And sped away
Far
On a horse.

On the way to
I look
All in anxiety
All trembling -
My dear!
I will be long
pouring tears,
Wound in the heart
to stir up -
God is with you!

Schopenhauer from underground

The lyrical hero of Sologub's poetry is in many ways a small person Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. The great personal experience of suppressing the human personality of the future great writer allowed him to embody personal suffering in the metaphysical image of a humiliated and offended people.

Everything is given to me in abundance,
labor fatigue,
Expectations of evil torture,
Hunger, cold and trouble.

The tar of ardent reproach,
Strict glory bitter honey,
Poison of crazy temptations
And despair ice

And - the crown of remembrance,
Cup, drunk to the bottom -
Unforgettable kissing lips, -
Everything, only joy is not given.

Sologub absolutized personal suffering, elevating it to the suffering of humanity, giving it a certain cosmic character. One critic said of him: This is some Russian Schopenhauer, who came out of a suffocating basement". The tragedy and ugliness of the man from the underground, discovered by Dostoevsky, were lyrically revealed in the poetry of Sologub. No wonder in the West he was perceived as the heir Dostoevsky.

Like an incoherent tale of an idiot
Life is boring and dark.
Waiting in vain for something
Its depth is unrequited.

Strangely mixed up roads.
And for some reason I'm delirious.
Before me in crimson delirium
Golden towers, halls.

In 1892 Sologub moved to Petersburg, there he gets a job as a mathematics teacher, and then becomes an inspector at the Andreevsky School and a member of the St. Petersburg School Council.

Atypical Symbolist

In St. Petersburg, Teternikov meets the poet and philosopher Nicholas Minsky, journal secretary northern messenger and becomes an employee of this magazine. Minsky introduces him to the circle of "senior symbolists": Z. Gippius, D. Merezhkovsky, K. Balmont.

Sologub becomes a representative and propagandist of this trend in poetry. However, in his work there was also something that distinguishes him from classical symbolism: irony, sarcasm - this is what broke Sologub's muse out of these canonical frameworks.

Then mocking my genius
Told me a lot
unpoetic comparisons.
I went out into the field under the moon, -

On the pulp of a ripe watermelon
Looks like a red moon
And sometimes toads belly
She reminded me. -

these comparisons were clearly not from the lexicon of the symbolists. Or, for example, the poem ads»:

Need doctors and nurses
That's what all the papers say,
We need tailors.
But who needs poets?

Where can you find the ad:
We invite the poet to the house
Then what became unbearable
The usual explanation is the warehouse,

And we want beautiful words
And they are ready to give their souls into captivity!
"I'm ready to buy a property."
"We need dairy cows."

Or here is an absolutely amazing poem from the cycle “ Svirel»:

“Fear, daughter, the arrows of Cupid.
These arrows hurt more.
He will see - the fool walks,
Aiming right at her heart.

Smart girls will not be touched,
will go far beyond them,
Only fools in the network drives
And lead to death."

Lisa clung to her mother,
Tears in three streams,
And, blushing, she confessed:
"Mom, mom, I'm a fool! .."

So Fyodor Sologub was not an ordinary symbolist. His poetic work is not limited to the reputation of a militant decadent and aesthete, it is more complex, richer and more significant. In his aesthetic principles, the main thing was the requirement of "external simplicity", general intelligibility and transparency of art. This was also noted Block emphasizing " simplicity, rigor and the absence of any spice and tinsel”, which distinguished then symbolist poetry.

Nothing is visible in the field.
Someone calls: "Help!"
What I can?
I myself am poor and small,
I'm dead tired myself
How can I help?

Someone calls in silence:
"My brother, come closer to me!
It's easier together.
If we can't go
Let's die together on the way
Let's die together!"

K. Chukovsky wrote that he first read this verse "as a boy":

« I was struck by the ascetic simplicity of these lines. Not a single epithet, not a single metaphor, no panache of chimes, no eloquence, no pathetic gestures, verbal ornaments, a beggarly poor dictionary - but in this absence of any effects, the strongest effect was: the more artlessly the form of these outwardly miserable verses, the more surely they reached to the heart. That's what struck me these verses: I realized that for such artlessness great art is required, that in this utmost simplicity there is beauty:

What I can?..
How can I help?

And this at a time when almost all young poetry was cultivating frills, twists and turns of speech, when the empty rhetoric of Balmontovism was already beginning to reign in literature. And other verses of Sologub, which I happened to read at that time, seduced me with the same noble classical beauty of simplicity - a beauty that eschews any embellishment.».

Sologub in Saratov

From 1913 to 1916, Fyodor Sologub made a lecture tour with lectures on art (“ The Art of Our Days”, “Russia in the Dreams and Expectations of Poets"). He traveled with them 39 cities. The trips were widely covered in the press.
February 3, 1914 he lectured at Saratov in the premises of the former commercial club on the street Radishcheva(now the House of Officers).

Here is a quote from the newspaper Saratov sheet” from February 5, 1914 (№30):
“Fyodor Sologub's lecture at the Commercial Club took place in front of a crowded hall, arousing considerable interest among the public. From the outside, Sologub's speech, although monotonous, was beautifully constructed and presented a series of aphorisms of a kind. After the announcement, F. Sologub read several of his own poems, evoking loud applause. There was no late debate”.
And here is what Sologub writes to his wife about the same lecture Anastasia Chebotarevskaya: “The lecture was not public, but only for club members and guests; members free of charge, and guests - 50 k. (characteristic statements in his letters: “The audience was 205 rubles”). There was a Babylonian pandemonium there, such a crowd as they had never had before in their meetings - more than 1,000 people. A lot of young people, but a lot of respectable persons. They listened unusually attentively for such a crowd. After the lecture, they asked for poetry”.

Sologub describes in this letter a funny episode that happened then in Saratov:
“In front of me on Thursday was an evening about futurism. Four local young varmints published a stupid almanac under the futurists, they called themselves psycho-futurists. The public and local newspapers took it seriously; there were many articles in the newspapers, the public eagerly bought up the almanac. At a party at the Commercial Club, these gentlemen revealed that they were joking to prove that Futurism was absurd. Now the Saratov people are very angry that they were fooled”.

Simplicity and truth

Georgy Ivanov believed that Sologub's poems - " one of the most truthful in Russian poetry". They are true both artistically and humanly. And by its restraint, alien to everything external and ostentatious, and by the clear chastity of the poet's childish soul reflected in them.

My quiet friend, my distant friend,
Look -
I'm cold and sad
Light of dawn.

I'm waiting in vain
deities,
In a pale life I don't know
Celebrations.

Will soon rise above the ground
Clear day,
And sink into the silent abyss
Evil shadow -

Silent and sad
In the morning
My secret friend, my distant friend,
I will die.

Emphasized everyday life makes Sologub related to I. Annensky(who also devoted half his life to the cause of school education). Here is a wonderful poem simple song". In fact, this is a terribly difficult song about how simply a child was killed during the dispersal of a demonstration in 1905.

under the tips
Enemy peak
Svetik killed,
Light dead drooped.

cute little boy
My little,
You won't come back
You won't come home.

They beat, they shot, -
You didn't run
You are on the road
You were on the road.

Officer's horse
enemy forces
Right to the heart
Stepped right into my heart.

Pretty little boy
My little,
You won't come back
You won't come home.

Having enthusiastically met the February Revolution, Sologub did not accept the October Revolution inwardly. Although his origin should be close to this power, but the essence, the spirit of his creativity - he was alien to her. " There seems to be something humane in their ideas,- he said, remembering his humiliated youth and recognizing himself as the son of a working people. - But you can't live with them! And he wrote about it in verse:

The verse, as before, does not sound.
Need new props.
Jets, trills, groves, gave
They ate dirty pigs.

Light rivers silver
Drowning stinky goodness.
There was once velvet in poetry,
And now he's all hawk

And the sweet scent
He smelled the Soviet mat.
The beauty of the nightingale's song
Now covered in urine.

romantic moon
Drunk with the same moisture.
The word "face" sounded proud,
And now we need a muzzle.

At one time Sologub was friends with block. They often went together and often filmed.

Then, during the period twelve", he has already lost interest in Blok.
We all admired the audacity of political poetry Mandelstam 1934" We live under us without feeling the country ...” But much earlier, in the spring of 1921, these lines of Sologub were written:

A wide ax will not cut off
His criminal head
And fame will trumpet about him,
But all his works are dead.

This poem was excluded from the preliminary composition of the volume of Sologub's works in the BP series, because under it was the date of its writing: April 22, 1922, leaving no doubt that it is addressed to the leader of the revolution.

Created legend

Yet these verses are not the essence of Sologub's poetry. And he himself expressed his credo in art in this way:

Whatever the government
and whatever the law says,
we know your guidance,
O radiant Apollo!

"Apollonian" art, the art of a consoling and seductive dream, the "veil of Maya", hiding from us the truth, terrible in its nakedness, creating "another world, desired" - this is what Sologub's poetry is. But life is constantly tearing apart the saving and seductive veil of illusions, and through its gaps its essence seems even more terrible.

You live crazy and rotten
A street accessible to all
A dusty roar, the laughter of a bully,
Drunk prostitutes rusty laughter.

Vile girlfriends swarm -
Malice, filth, depravity, poverty.
How can arise in this circle
An inspirational dream?

But it will! It always comes up!
The life of the people is full of creativity,
And raises above the muddy foam
The beauty of the world wave.

The dominant theme in Sologub's work is the theme of a dream that transforms the world. He claimed: " There is no real happiness. There is only happiness created". In his novel Created legend» Sologub writes:
« I take a piece of life, rough and poor, and create a sweet legend out of it, for I am a poet. Slow in the darkness, dull, everyday, or rage with a furious fire - over you, life, I, the poet, will erect a legend created by me about the charming and beautiful».

Through the cruel ways of being
I am delirious, homeless and sir.
But all nature is mine,
the world dresses up for me.

Let it be impossible to change something in this world, but

What will stop me
Raise all the worlds
which he wishes
Law of my game?

Live and believe deceit
and fairy tales and dreams.
Your spiritual wounds
a balm that delights in them.

Let real life be rude, cruel, unfair, the poet will oppose it with his “created legend” - other worlds where the soul goes after death and where everything that we lacked on earth will come true. About this - his cycle " Star Mair"(1898), who sang the light of a star Mair on beautiful land Oile where the magical river flows League.

The star Mair shines above me,
star Mair,
And illuminated by a beautiful star
Distant world.

The land of Oile floats in the waves of ether,
Oile land,
And the shining light of Maira is clear
On that land.

River Ligoi in the land of love and peace,
Ligoy River
The quietly clear face of Mair shakes
With your wave.

Sologub creates a myth about a distant beautiful country, where " everything that we lacked here, everything that the sinful earth was sad about ”. There is some connection here with Dostoevsky, with his The dream of a funny man”, with a “golden dream” about a distant star, where the sinless and happy “children of the sun” live in great love and eternal joy.

On Oil far and beautiful
All my love and all my soul.
On Oil far and beautiful
Song sweet and consonant
Glorifies all the bliss of being.

There, in the radiance of the clear Mair,
Everything blooms, everything sings joyfully.
There, in the radiance of the clear Mair,
In the flutter of light ether,
The other world mysteriously lives.

Quiet coast of the blue Ligoy
All in colors of unearthly beauty.
Quiet coast of the blue Ligoy -
Eternal world of bliss and peace,
The eternal world of a dream come true.

A. Blok was especially fond of this cycle. He gave Sologub his collection " Poems about a beautiful lady" with an inscription: " F.K. Sologub - the author of the star Mair - Consolation - fairy tales - as a token of deep consolation and gratitude.

Many-sided Sologub

Mandelstam, who highly appreciated Sologub, wrote about him: At first, due to our youthful immaturity, we saw in Sologub only a comforter, muttering sleepy words, only a skillful cradle-maker who teaches forgetfulness - but the further we went, the more we understood that Sologub's poetry is the science of action, the science of will, the science of courage and love. ".

Open up your door
And go around the fence.
Restless now -
Don't lie down, don't fall asleep, wait.

Maybe this night
And someone will call you.
Are you quick to help?
And will you go on an unknown path?

And can you sleep?
You think: in the dark, behind the wall
Someone will call
Lonely, tired, sick.

Come out to the gate
And carry a lantern before you.
Even if you died yourself
But the one who calls, save.

The portrait of Sologub was painted by many artists. Here is a portrait B. Kustodieva(1907), where Sologub is a modest gymnasium teacher in pince-nez with a "teacher's" beard and mustache.

Many have noted its resemblance to F. Tyutchev. Sologub in this portrait is only 44 years old, but he looked much older than his years. It notes taffy in his memoirs: He was a man, as I now understand, about forty years old, but then, probably because I myself was very young, he seemed old to me, not even old, but somehow ancient. His face was pale, long, without eyebrows, there was a large wart near the nose, a thin reddish beard seemed to drag down his thin cheeks, dull, half-closed eyes. Always tired, always bored face. I remember in one of his poems he says:

I myself am poor and small,
I'm dead tired...

It was this mortal weariness that his face always expressed. Sometimes, somewhere at a party at the table, he closed his eyes and, as if forgetting to open them, remained for several minutes. He never laughed. Such was the appearance of Sologub».
No less popular is his other portrait - K. Somova (1910).

Here Sologub is depicted no longer as a modest teacher, but as a venerable master of decadent salons. A sarcastic grin, fatigue and skepticism in the wrinkles at the mouth, a strict, straight posture make him look like a Roman emperor from the time of decline. It was Sologub's favorite portrait, he said: "There I look exactly like." This portrait is kept in Russian Museum In Petersburg.

Portrait of Sologub by N. Vysheslavtsev

Irina Odoevtseva Sologub seemed "white marble", reminded her of a tomb statue, the Stone Guest, a monument to himself. " Brick in a frock coat - so called him V. Rozanov.

« In appearance, really not a man - a stone, - echoes him G. Ivanov. - And no one guesses that under this frock coat, in this “brick”, there is a heart. A heart ready to burst from sadness and tenderness, despair and pity».

I composed these measured sounds,
To quench the hunger of the soul
So that eternal torment of the heart,
Drown in silvery streams,

To sound like a nightingale chant,
Your charming voice, dream,
So that, burned by a long torment,
Smiled at least with a song of the mouth.

Lunar Lilith and grandmother Eve

Sologub could not stand a rough life; he could say to himself, along with Dostoevsky, that he felt as if his skin had been torn off. Every touch from the outside resonates in him with excruciating pain. Life appears to Sologub as a ruddy and plump woman - Eve, unlike the beautiful moon Lilith- his dreams.

She seems to him vulgar, vulgar, popular.

The poet wants to remake it in his own way, etch everything bright, strong, colorful out of it. He has a taste for everything quiet, dull, soundless, incorporeal. Something Sologub in this sense resembles baudelaire, who preferred a painted and whitened face to a lively blush and loved artificial flowers. He was afraid of life and loved Death, whose name he wrote with a capital letter and for which he found gentle words. He was called the Deathly Joyful, the death knight.

Charm of death

I'm walking the cold path alone
I forgot the earthly and I wait for the hidden, -
and silent death will kiss me,
and lead you away, the silence of autumn.

Sologub has a cult of death. He creates a myth about death-bride, girlfriend, savior, comforter, relieving a person from hardships and torment.

O Death! I am yours. Everywhere I see
one you - and I hate
the charm of the earth.
Human delights are alien to me,
battles, holidays and auctions,
all this noise in the dust of the earth.

« There is a certain charm of death in the very style of his writings., - wrote Korney Chukovsky. — These frozen, quiet, even lines, this, as we have seen, the soundlessness of all his words - is not here the source of Sologub's special beauty, which will be felt by everyone who has been given the ability to smell beauty? In his poems it is always cold, no matter how the celestial serpent inflames them, cold and quiet.

petty imp

But if in poetry Sologub speaks most often about a beautiful life, about beauty, then in prose he tends to embody the monstrous life. In 1905, Sologub's novel " petty imp", which he wrote for 10 years.

Its success exceeded all expectations - in the five years since the publication of the book, it has been reprinted five times. This is one of the great novels of the century. There are suggestions that it was written based on the impressions of Sologub's stay in Vytegre.

The monotonous dull everyday life of a provincial town, its "animal life", the ugly customs of the inhabitants - all this splashed out on the pages of Sologub's novel from his many years of personal experience.

To be continued.

Fyodor Sologub (real name Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov)

1863 - 1927

The periods of the writer's work: early (1878-1892), middle (1892-1904), mature (1905-1913), late, which in turn splits into two (1914-1919, 1920-1927). Understanding the meaning of his position is possible in the context of all his work. The writer himself considered such an approach a necessary condition for a serious conversation about himself as an artist, he was convinced that he remained misunderstood. Did not tell his biography. In such a position, there was not only resentment against criticism, which did not skimp on characterizations (decadent, maniac, psychopath), but also the attitude that not his work was understood from the biography, but, on the contrary, an empirical personality - from the work in which Sologub created his autobiographical myth.

Favorable for his cultural development, an intelligent family interested in art, Agapova's cordial relationship with the servants, who were like family members. And at the same time, very strange living conditions - the eccentricity of the hostess, the nervous laxity of the family, frequent and cruel spankings.

The boy, who began writing poetry at the age of 12, early believed in his calling “to preach a great idea. And when he was punished, he began to perceive it as a means to spiritual purification.

In 1878-1882, Sologub studied at the St. Petersburg Teacher's Institute, and then worked as a teacher in the provinces for ten years. These years account for the early, pre-symbolist period of his work.. Along with poetry (first published in 1881), he tries himself in prose.

Like other senior symbolists who began their journey in the 1880s, Sologub at the time of his formation was strongly influenced by civil poetry - from Nekrasov to Nadson. Sologub is looking for a different way to create a lyrical "I", connecting civil grief and eternal questions. Particularly reminiscent of Nadson from the early poems of the poet - "Believe, the bloodthirsty idol will fall" (1887), "What to regret about a broken glass" (1889). Sologub's innovation was the biographical and domestic grounding of the civic theme.

Despite the apparent naivete and unintentionality of the almost grotesque connection between the civil and the personally biographical, its ironic effect is undeniable. Irony permeates all of Sologub's work, turning to the poet's most precious thing - civil grief.

But the poet brings together both pre-symbolist traditions in a special way. So, for Sologub, barefoot becomes both a sign of the hero's social deprivation, and a romantic grotesque, and a symbol of openness to mother earth. Heroes of Sologub are not only forced, but also like to go barefoot, not because they are poor, although in this very motive one can read, among other things, a social plan.

In the poems of 1879-1892, along with the clichés of civil poetry, such as "the abyss of evil and human untruth", in which evil is distanced from the "I" and placed in the abstract social sphere of life, the tendency to a metaphysical understanding of this phenomenon persistently makes itself felt. First, the presence of evil in the "I" is explained by the fact that it penetrated into his soul from the outside.. The gradual internalization of the motif contributes to developing a view of evil both from the outside and from the inside, from the position of a person who does not separate himself from the evil that exists in the world.

Stage 2. The theme of the obsession with life and death and its overcoming will become from that time one of the central ones in Sologub, peculiarly coloring the lyrics of the second period of his work. The lyrical "I", which he formed during these years, was new for Russian poetry, although it has its roots in civil and romantic lyrics and has some analogies in the work of other older symbolists.

In the 1870s-1880s, a hero was established in Russian literature, directly aware of his responsibility for everything that happens in the world, and able to discern in each specific manifestation - the world's evil. But the reflective hero in the literature of these years is aware of his "I" as an obstacle to gaining real unity with the world - hence his desire "to wrest from the heart of this nasty god that sucks the soul." In Sologub, the feeling of connection with the world does not imply a rejection of the “I”, but expansion, assertion of its independent value, up to the desire to put it at the center of the world process. On this basis, a new “absolute self” for Russian poetry is born. Sologub creates a myth, according to one version of which the "I" existed, like the Orphic Eros, even before the creation of the world. Due to its belonging to the world, Sologub's lyrical "I" refuses to look at anything from the outside - as someone else's. Therefore, evil in the artistic world of the poet has ceased to be localized outside, which allows the poet to build on the statement on behalf of "I" such poems in which the self-disclosure of the "evil" consciousness is given ("I love to wander over the quagmire") - in this Sologub goes much further than others symbolists.

As a body and individuality, man is only a phenomenon, subject to the law of reason, causality, time and space. But as the bearer of the world will, he is fundamentally insubstantial, he is that which knows everything, but is not known by anyone. For Sologub, the idea of ​​the duality of man, irreducible to a self-sufficing unity, is extremely important. the thought of the impossibility of being aware of oneself independently of the world and the intuition of the "voice" of the other, sounding in the very depths of our "I".

Man for Sologub is completely separated from the world, the world is incomprehensible to him and cannot be understood. The only way to overcome the severity of life's evil is to plunge into the beautiful, comforting sweet legend created by the artist's imagination. And Sologub contrasts the world of violence, depicted in the symbolic images of Likh, the Petty Demon, Nedotykomka, with the fantastic beautiful land of Oile. In the coexistence of the real and the invalid: Peredonov, the most real in his vulgarity, the hero of The Little Demon, and the evil spirit that rushes about in front of him in the form of a gray Nedotykomka, the real world and images of a broken decadent fantasy - a feature of the writer's artistic worldview.

Sologub's aesthetic credo is contained in his well-known formula: "I take a piece of life ... and create a sweet legend out of it, for I am a poet."

But it turns out that the legend is also by no means sweet, but unbearably dreary. Life is earthly imprisonment, suffering, madness. Attempts to find a way out of it - fruitless languor. People, like animals in a cage, are doomed to hopeless loneliness. The soul of the poet is torn between the desire to get rid of the suffering of the world and the futility of any attempt to get out of the cells of vital evil, because the life and death of people are controlled by evil forces beyond the control of consciousness. The perception of human life as a miserable toy in the hands of some demonic forces found a classic expression in the poem "Damn's Swing".

Clearance in the horror of life is only in the realization of some ideal beauty, but it also turns out to be perishable. For the poet, the only reality and value of the world is his own "I", everything else is a creation of his imagination. The language of Sologub's poetry is devoid of metaphorization, laconic; in his poems, a stable system of symbols has developed, through which the motive of repeated existences also passes. The images of the poet are emblems, symbols, devoid of concrete, sensual tangibility.

The poet does not have a distant look at any phenomenon in the world, he refuses to look from the outside at anything.

During these years, Sologub finds a figurative language adequate to such a vision. This is the language of parallelism, which speaks in its very inner form of the original inseparability of the "I" and nature: It implements the poetic principle, which will be formulated by him later as a combination of the lyrical "no" and the ironic "yes". This is how, for example, two related poems are organized - “Charter to wander through the desert of life” and “Live and believe in deceptions”. In the first, everything that the poet went to and, it would seem, came to is subjected to lyrical doubt and appears as another version of self-deception and “obsession” with being - everything that the second poem says “yes”, but already ironic.

If lyricism was for Sologub a sphere where the obsession with being was overcome from within and a new view of the world was born, then prose contributed to the epic distancing from the hero. In the stories of 1892-1904. the writer focuses on the theme of childhood. Children, according to Sologub, differ from adults in their divinely playful proximity to all-being. The child is given a direct vision of the world.

The suffering attitude towards the child finds an unexpected refraction in the novel "Small Demon" (1892-1902). Continuity of the novel in relation to the satirical line of Russian literature. It was in "Small Demon" - "Dead Souls" were involuntarily restored - by the world of provincial philistines. Peredonov is taken from nature.

But in the characters of The Little Demon the mortification of the soul goes much further than in Gogol's characters, and in this respect its main character Peredonov leaves far behind Gogol's dead souls. The depth of the author's denial of this reality reaches dimensions unprecedented in our literature. Peredonov is each of us. Sologub wrote: “Some think that the author, being a very bad person, wished to give his portrait. Others very subtly noticed that the writer painted his own portrait and portraits of his acquaintances. No, my dear contemporaries, it was about you that I wrote my novel,” Sologub insists that he created the image of a “hero” of his time, but is silent about the metahistorical meaning of his novel and its symbolic ambiguity, already evident in the title.

Sologub's depiction of reality constantly doubles, approaching either realistic social satire or romantic grotesque and irony, and moves in a direction that makes one speak of The Little Demon as a mythical novel. Sologub's novel unfolds "a picture of the degradation of the human mind, returning to decrepit chaos. The obsession with chaos takes on extreme forms in the novel, especially in its protagonist. Peredonov's consciousness is open only in this direction and is tightly closed to the opposite pole of world life. Peredonov felt in nature reflections of his anguish, his fear under the guise of her hostility towards him.

But Peredonov is not only a minus hero, he is also a minus demiurge of the novel, of which he is the hero. The Little Demon seems to have been composed in the wild delirium of Peredonov himself. Peredonov's "authorship" is manifested in the fact that the plot of the novel becomes the realization and language of his delusional states that subjugate reality. Moreover, he also inspires the second storyline of the "Small Demon", which is often regarded as "positive" and opposite to his own - the Sasha-Lyudmila line. Peredonov turns out to be the main spreader of rumors that Sasha Pylnikov is a girl in disguise. True, Peredonov is not the creator of the rumors about Sasha, just as he is not the direct creator of his own storyline - in both cases Grushina and Varvara play him, but they do it quite in the style of the hero himself. Only after a conversation with Grushina does Varvara tell Peredonov about their discovery; her story ignited a lascivious curiosity in him, which is transmitted through him to Lyudmila and the whole city, becoming the engine of the second storyline of the novel. Thus, Sasha is included in the main plot of Peredon's search for a "place" and a "wife" even before the Sasha-Lyudmila line becomes independent thanks to Peredonov's efforts. It is very important that by the end of the novel, both storylines run in parallel, intersecting in the masquerade scenes and contrasting in the finale. This creates not only contrast, but also a "match" of lines. Peredonov suddenly rises almost to the point of tragedy, while Lyudmila and Sasha ironically sink.

The special status of Peredonov sharpens the most important question for understanding The Little Demon, the question of the relationship between the author and the hero in it. Rapprochement with the children's theme is carried out due to the fact that the evil hero and tormentor of children himself appears before us, among other things, as a frightened and suffering child.

It is in this novel that the writer's denial of this life reaches limits unprecedented in our literature - it is total and uncompromising. The author tries to commit an individual act of destruction by describing the evil of the world. But this is only one side, and if only she were in the novel, the author's position would not differ fundamentally from the position of the hero, and the epigraph - "I wanted to burn her, the evil sorceress" would almost coincide in meaning with Peredonov's confession: "I burned the princess, yes unburned: spat. In fact, in the epigraph and the quoted words of the hero, two creative wills collide. At the same time, the creative will of the author has a semantic excess in relation to the hero, who makes an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the evil of the world, which he himself is obsessed with.

This excess is the overcoming of "obsession", demonism in oneself and one's attitude towards another, even an extremely alien and terrible "other" - a demon. The fact that the bearer of evil, mercilessly portrayed, turns out to be at the same time a suffering child, the fact that he is one of us, suggests that the author, without justifying Peredonov, takes an "out of life active" position in relation to him, fundamentally different from the position in life. the hero himself. The creator of the novel turns out to be able to pity the possessed demon and thanks to this he himself is freed from the possession of evil.

The next period of creativity of Sologub is 1904-1913. The intensity of lyrical creativity is somewhat weakening, although it is now that a number of central poetic books are being published, including works of the 1890-1910s: homeland", "Snake". As early as 1903, civic motifs began to grow in Sologub's lyrics. During the revolution of 1905-1907, he was captured by the pathos of social transformations, actively responding to topical events in his Poems. His book "Motherland" includes poems from 1885-1905, but it is based on works from 1903-1905. Sologub does not have a female image isolated from the lyrical stream, but there is also no absolute "I", so characteristic of his other books. A special kind of unity of man and nature-motherland arises (“O Rus! Exhausted in anguish”). Beauty and homeland are parallel here. In general, Sologub is characterized by the convergence of different plans, creating unity and complementarity of the most concrete with the universal. Under the sign of such a connection, he perceives the deeply personal events of his life.

The new period of creativity belongs not only to a significant part of the poems included in the book, but also to the artistic concept itself. In the first section of the "Fiery Circle" - in "Masks of Experiences" - the lyrical subject goes through a series of historical and metahistorical transformations. He is embodied in biblical, antique, Indian, European, Russian lyrical characters and in the heroes of individual Sologub myths about the evil demiurge, the country of Oil, the dog-man. Most of the poems in this section resemble role-playing ones: the statement in them is given on behalf of the characters.

The lyrics of Sologub recreate the attitude of an individualist of the turn of the century, who not only realizes, but also cultivates in every possible way his alienation from society. "Being with people - what a burden!" - this is how one of the early Sologub poems begins.

The poet opposed utopian romance to the evil and rude everyday life for him, dream of a happy and wonderful life somewhere in another ghostly world. So arose Cycle "Star Mair" (1898-1901), a poetic fantasy about an extraterrestrial blissful land of happiness and peace.

Sologub knew how to create in his poems, without reducing poetic intonation to ordinary speech and introducing into it a kind of “magic” shade, a feeling of painful grayness and lowland of philistine vegetation. The fruit of his imagination is "Nedotykomka gray" (1899), a haunting obsession born of superstition, wild, inert life, worldly vulgarity and despair.

A frequent theme in Sologub's poetry is the power of the devil over man ("When I swam in a stormy sea", 1902). In this poetic demonism, the imprint of a cultivated amoralism is clear, but at the same time, the devil in Sologub symbolizes not only the evil reigning in the world, but also expresses a rebellious protest against the narrow-minded well-being. Sologub's interpretation of the image of the sun is noteworthy. In the understanding of Sologub, this is "The serpent reigning over the universe, all on fire, insanely evil". Sologub praises the cold "sinless" moon, he is her inspired singer. Of the collections of poems by Sologub, the most significant is "The Fiery Circle". Its title is symbolic: it implies the eternal cycle of human reincarnations, in which the poet, as it were, sees himself in other people's destinies. “As a poet, Sologub is distinguished by the external simplicity of his verse, behind which high professional skill is hidden. In Sologub's poems individual words and whole phrases are repeated with great skill, picked up and varied; he had just as perfect command of the rhythm and compositional structure of his works.

"I am the God of the Mysterious World"

I am the god of the mysterious world,

The whole world is in my dreams

I will not create an idol for myself

Neither on earth nor in heaven.

my divine nature

I will not open to anyone.

I work like a slave, but for freedom

I call the night, peace and darkness

"Star Mair"

The star Mair shines above me,

star Mair,

And illuminated by a beautiful star

Distant world.

The land of Oile floats in the waves of ether,

Oile land,

And the shining light of Maira is clear

On that land.

River Ligoi in the land of love and peace,

Ligoy River

The quietly clear face of Mair shakes

With your wave.

The rattling of the lyre, the fragrance of the flowers,

The rattling of the lyre

And the songs of the wives merged into one breath,

Praise Meir.

On Oil far and beautiful

All my love and all my soul.

On Oil far and beautiful

Song sweet and consonant

Glorifies all the bliss of being.

There, in the radiance of the clear Mair,

Everything blooms, everything sings joyfully.

There, in the radiance of the clear Mair,

In the flutter of light ether,

The other world mysteriously lives.

Quiet coast of the blue Ligoy

All in colors of unearthly beauty.

Quiet coast of the blue Ligoy -

Eternal world of bliss and peace,

The eternal world of a dream come true.

Everything we've been missing here

Everything that the sinful earth grieved about,

Blossomed on you and shone,

O Ligoi blessed fields!

The world of earthly enmity was filled,

The poor earthly world is immersed in despondency,

We are pleased with the quiet grave

And like death, a long, dark sleep.

But the League flows and trembles,

And wonderful flowers are fragrant,

And the sinless Mair quietly shines

Above the blissful edge of eternal beauty.

My ashes will decay little by little

It rots in the damp earth,

And I'll find a way between the stars

To another country, to my Oile.

I will forget everything earthly

And there I will not be a stranger, -

I trust another miracle

Like the habits of the earth.

We will be with you soon

Let's die on earth

We are with you

Let's go to Oil.

Under the clear Mair

We will know again

Under the bright Mair

Holy love.

And everything that hides

Jealously our world

What the sun hides

Mayr will show.

Passionless light from Maira,

Wives have a sinless look, -

Shining with Maira

Great holiday of the world

Surrounded by joy.

distant joy

close to my soul,

Oyle, your consolation -

invisible fence

From vain passions.

In this composition, the Star Mair cycle was first published in the Third Book of Poems (1904). The poems of the cycle were written in September 1898, with the exception of the sixth, which was written on January 10, 1901.

"Nedotykomka gray"

Lump gray

Everything around me twists and turns,

Is it not famously outlined with me

In a single deadly circle?

Lump gray

Tired of an insidious smile,

Tired of sitting down unsteady, -

Help me, mysterious friend!

Gray undercoat

Drive away with magic spells

Or backhand, or something, with blows,

Or some cherished word.

Gray undercoat

Even if you kill me, vicious,

So that she, at least in melancholy requiem

Didn't scold my ashes.

"We are captive animals"

Silently locked doors

We dare not open them.

If the heart is true to the legends,

Consoling ourselves by barking, we bark.

What is in the menagerie is fetid and nasty,

We forgot a long time ago, we don't know.

The heart is accustomed to repetitions, -

Monotonous and boring cuckoo.

Everything in the menagerie is impersonal, usually

We have not longed for freedom for a long time.

Silently locked doors

We dare not open them.

"Damn Swing"

In the shade of a shaggy spruce,

Over the noisy river

The devil is swinging the swing

Furry hand.

Rocking and laughing

Back and forth,

Back and forth.

The board creaks and bends

Oh, the heavy bough rubs

Stretched rope.

Snuggles with a lingering creak

jogging board,

And the devil laughs with a wheeze,

Grabbing the sides.

I'm holding on, I'm languishing, I'm swinging,

I grab and swing

And I try to take

From the devil a languid look.

Above the top of a dark spruce

Laughs blue:

"Caught on a swing,

Rock on, to hell with you."

I know the devil won't quit

swift board,

Until I get knocked down

A threatening wave of the hand

Until it frays

Spinning, hemp

Until it turns up

To me my land.

I will fly higher than the spruce,

And forehead on the ground fuck.

Swing, damn, swing,

Higher, higher... ah!

Features of the idiostyle of Fyodor Sologub and numerous critical analyzes created a certain stereotype of ideas about the writer's work: the same type of subject matter ("singer of death"), the monotony of the poetic means used, the uniformity of techniques. And this despite the fact that the very personality of the artist and his creations received the most controversial assessments in the reviews of contemporaries - from enthusiastic to ironic. "... In the eyes of sophisticated modernists, in the assessment, for example, of" Scales ", where he was always an honored and welcome guest, Sologub is the father of Russian modernism, a subtle and elegant writer, clearly groping for new paths in art, a rare stylist who achieves exceptional beauties, the Russian Baudelaire, etc. - for others, this is a perverted poet, "a terrible, dislocated, warped soul" - this is how one of the well-known critics of those years A. Izmailov described the situation that developed around the name of Sologub at the beginning of the century. the two extremes that he stated are all other estimates.

Starting to write "simultaneously with Chekhov", Sologub gained popularity only in the mid-1900s. “If Sologub weren’t as talented as he is, they would pass by his works without paying attention. It’s very easy to call his novels and stories “nonsense”, antics or even the delirium of a patient. critic. That Sologub is "undoubtedly a strong artist," those who were unable to decipher the iconographic references of Sologub's "abstruse" text were forced to admit.

The very image of the poet seemed mysterious to his contemporaries. "Sologub was considered a sorcerer and a sadist," recalled N. Teffi. "They said that he was a Satanist, and this inspired horror and at the same time interest," L. Ryndina wrote in her memoirs. Another contemporary of the writer, the symbolist poet A. Bely, admitted: "It seemed to me: he was some kind of Buddhist monk, from the Himalayas, looking both indifferently and dryly at our deeds ...". The work of this "strange man" seemed equally mysterious. Here are just a few statements on this topic: "There is some kind of magic in every thing of Sologub, even in the weaker one"; “However, we don’t know him entirely at all: he is still mysterious and obscure for us - this most mysterious of contemporary writers”; "Much of it is difficult to understand..." and others. It is no coincidence that A. Izmailov, who often reviewed Sologub, elevated the artist to the literary Olympus, but used an ancient irrational image-symbol to characterize the writer: "Northern Sphinx" (this is the name of one of his articles ). But Sologub was loved for his ability to ask questions. The philosopher L. Shestov, who shared the fate of writers "for the few" (Izmailov) with F. Sologub, saw in his fellow writer and fate the chosen one of God: "Sologub is an oracle. His prose is not realism, but stupefying vapors, his poetry, like Pythia's answers are an eternal and tormenting riddle." The critic V. Botsyanovsky explained the difficulty in understanding the works of Sologub by this feature of the master's creations. “It is difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to name in all our literature a writer more original and mysterious, like Fyodor Sologub ... Each new story of his, each new novel, always very similar to the old one and closely connected with everything that preceded it, until stunned to such an extent that many directly refused not only to understand, but also to interpret this author, so different from others. Sologub's contemporaries quite rightly stressed that the writer's work cannot fit into one formula.

Sologub entered literature as a poet, but for Sologub during his glory years - 1907-1913 - it was prose that played a constitutive role. According to many pre-revolutionary researchers of the artist's work, Sologub is equal to himself, his talent both in poetry and in prose. "He is distinguished by the evenness of his creativity, his prose is no weaker than his poetry, and in both areas he is prolific," - A. Blok. "...His poems are really beautiful, and his fragrant prose..." - admired I. Johnson. The prose texts of Sologub were conceived as a kind of continuation and interpretation of the "primary" poetic texts. The novels and stories of the artist were read by critics of the beginning of the century from the point of view of his poetry. "I do not make a difference between his poems and his prose. His prose is full of the same poetry as his poems," V. Botsyanovsky quite rightly asserted. Without denying the genetic similarity of Sologub's prose and poetic texts, other connoisseurs of the writer's work also noticed that the "Russian Schopenhauer" (Volynsky) was more able to express the "monstrous life" (Blok) in prose than in poetry. In his poems Sologub, in the words of L. Shestov, "howls senselessly", and "in prose - even worse ... worse than an animal cry."

The work of this writer may, like the words of holy fools, seem ridiculous, absurd, frivolous (Redko, Ignatov, etc.) or terrible, philosophical (Bely, etc.), but it eschews labels. Meanwhile, one of them ("sick novel"), as a demonstration of his negative attitude, was immediately glued by criticism to Sologub's most capacious and voluminous work of life, which to some extent became the poet's hallmark, "The Created Legend". "After the Navi Charms," ​​Izmailov declared categorically, "there can be no positive doubt about the painful breakdown of the author's talent." This looseness of the imagination, this capricious mixture of the real with pure fantasy, this scattered and nervous lapidary style, reminiscent of a careless draft or notes in a notebook - all these are undoubtedly symptoms of a sick age. creativity "interpreted" it as "hysterics". It is interesting that when the critics of the beginning of the century tried to comprehend the "ugliness" and strangeness of Remizov's heroes ("The Hours") within the framework of well-known ideological and artistic models, they noted in his works the influence of F. Dostoevsky and F. Sologub (apparently, as the founders of "sick" prose). And the eccentricity of Remizov's outward manner of portraying Remizov was also defined by the word "foolishness." "Why be a fool, why not speak in human language?" asked the critic Gershenzon, obviously expressing the feeling of the majority of readers Sologub and Remizov.Own inability to appreciate the originality of the new work of F.Sologub, non-stand Criticism hastened to disguise the accuracy of the model of the world proposed by him by accusing the writer not only of insanity, but also of pathological inclinations.

It is surprising that some stigmatized the writer for a simplified or insulting recreation of the surrounding reality of the period of the first Russian revolution, while others reproached him for the absence of a legend as such in the "Created Legend". "What is the "created legend"? - did not understand one of the critics. “The content, it would seem, is rather primitive and does not give anything resembling a legend,” another stated and advised: “If Sologub took some mysterious life outside of time and space and decorated it with his imagination, then the reader could try to figure it out."

The leitmotif of the very first critical responses to "Creating a Legend" was the composition of the text. Being, in principle, not opposed to the artistic device itself, "weaving fantasy with realism into one uninterrupted tangle," critics pedaled the idea of ​​"disharmonism", the seal of which, in their opinion, marked the style of Sologubov's work. The main reproach was that Sologub not only wove reality and fantasy into "one uninterrupted tangle", but deliberately separated them. As one of the researchers of the third part of the novel noted, "reality and legend in Sologub do not penetrate into each other, but only alternate." The semantic and compositional heterogeneity of the text was explained by the incompetence of the author or explained by the tasks of verbal shocking: "The variegation is almost intentional. Almost obvious anachronisms. Intentional mixing of tones and styles. Intentional eccentricity of the language ...". No matter what comparisons and metaphors the "incoherence" of Sologubov's work was awarded ("... not a novel, but a pile of separate chapters and notes ..."; "... as if in a cinema, pictures flash before us that have no connection between himself..."), it is important to note the very fact of the discovery of this feature of the construction of Sologub's novel by the writer's contemporaries.

Thus, the "relationships" that developed between The Created Legend and its first critics give reason to believe that the novel was read but not understood. The underestimation of the trilogy distorted the picture of the development of Russian prose. But we must pay tribute to Sologub's contemporaries: firstly, they did not remain indifferent to the master's new book. Secondly - and this, perhaps, should be credited to Sologub's opponents - the strict judges of the novel, with that sensitivity that is sometimes born of hostility, managed to feel, recognize both the main melody of the work and those secondary tones, the identification of which will be the task of future commentators of the trilogy Sologub. However, having outlined the initial elements of the subsequent analysis, pre-revolutionary criticism preferred to leave to the descendants a close study, comprehension, and understanding of F. Sologub's "Created Legend".

FYODOR SOLOGUB (1863-1927)

The theme of creativity poet, prose writer, playwright, translator, theorist of symbolism F. Sologub is associated with the classics, while he differently than his predecessors, presented the problems of life, the meaning of creativity and ways to solve artistic problems. The realities of art in his works are combined with the phenomena of reality and fantasy. Behind the first plan of his narration of life events stands another plan, a mysterious one, which ultimately determines the course of events. As a philosopher, Sologub sought to express the essence of "things in themselves", ideas beyond the limits of sensory perceptions. His stylistic manner is largely intuitive, he builds his artistic world by combining elements of impressionism, expressionism, mysticism, naturalism and various spatio-temporal layers. Critics, who did not understand the playful manner of this modernist's work, perceived his works as "devilry", "fooling".

Creative biography and artistic world of F. Sologub

The childhood and youth of Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov) were difficult. His father, a tailor, died when his son was four and his daughter two years old. After that, the mother, almost until her death in 1884, worked in a wealthy family "only a servant." In the master's house, a gymnasium student, and then a student, Fedya Teternikov, could visit the "hall" in which literary and musical evenings were held, communicate with celebrities, read in the family library, could use the subscribed master's box in the theater, naturally, while remaining "the cook's son" . It is possible that the bifurcation of consciousness inherent in the characters of Sologub is partly due to the ambiguous social position of the future writer himself at the beginning of his conscious life.

Sologub had to "divide in two" later, "making his way into the people" on the pedagogical path. After graduating from the teacher's institute in 1882, for a quarter of a century he taught natural disciplines in provincial and then in metropolitan schools and gymnasiums, wrote a geometry textbook, while his soul was drawn to fine literature. Before returning to St. Petersburg in 1893, he published his poems and translations. His favorite French "damned ones" are still published in translations by Sologub, a teacher from the Russian hinterland. "Russian Verdun" called Sologub in literary circles. He also translated from English, German, Ukrainian. The first novel, Heavy Dreams (1882-1894, published in 1895), about the dramatic life of a teacher in a provincial town, was almost completely written in the provinces.

However, Fedya Teternikov felt himself a poet and prose writer very early. He wrote his first poems at the age of 12, at 16 he began work on a novel in the family chronicle genre. However, Sologub won a place on the literary Olympus for a long time and with difficulty. A novel has already been published, "Poems: Book One" (1895), "Shadows: Stories and Poems" (1896), the surname has already become familiar on the pages of fashion magazines such as "Northern Messenger", "World of Art", "New Way" , "Golden Fleece", "Pass", "Northern Flowers", but there was still no recognition. It came only with the publication of the novel The Little Demon (1907)2. Later, this success overshadowed other perfect creations of Sologub.

The list of magazines to which the recent provincial brought his work speaks of his established literary taste. Together with other senior symbolists, Sologub created the paradigms of the "new art", at the same time, in the camp of close artists, he, like no one else, expressed the decadent worldview3. The Symbolists strove for the divine absolute, all-conquering beauty of truth, goodness, justice, believing in the coming unity, overcoming the evil of the empirical world. Sologub followed his religious and aesthetic path, bypassing Sophia. It is noteworthy that in his poems there is a nameless female image endowed with mystical power. But Sologubov's "She" is contradictory, harsh... Solovyov's "flower of otherworldly countries" is "crumpled" ("On the sand of whimsical roads...", 1896). "She" can be associated with "obsessions of evil" ("Every day, at the appointed hour ...", 1894), at best, "she does not regret, but spares" ("Your names are not false ...", 1896) , rarely "consoles" ("You came to me more than once ...", 1897), does not forgive love for an "earthly wife" ("I cheated on you, unearthly ...", 1896).

A lot has been said about Sologub's "innate" decadence, but there is another side to this problem. The authors of the statements looked at his artistic world through the prism of the classics, and there is a bit of limitation in their assessments. Sologub began another art in which, apart from other innovations, reality and the realities of the previous belles-lettres are almost balanced in their meaning for the artist. Overcoming the mimetic, he went to the "art of the game."

An example of Sologub's misunderstanding is the discussion around the theme of death in his work. For decades, critics have resented the "poeticization of death." Very few allowed a different version of the author's interpretation of death - a "bridge", a "transition" from the empirical world to another. Sologub creates a virtual world where life and death have a special aesthetic dimension3. He absolutizes the mythologemes of immortality, living in the subconscious, in the beliefs of the tribes, crying at birth and rejoicing at the death of a person, in religious teachings. The writings grow out of the idea of ​​transmigration of the soul, the genetic memory of a past life1. The idea that real life is hell is an axiom, just like the fact that man is a martyr and creator of suffering2. This idea is clearly seen in the finale of the poem "I had a terrible dream ..." (1895), where the lyrical hero perceives the very opportunity to continue earthly life as a "cruel" sentence:

And, having finished the long way, I began to die, And I hear the cruel judgment: "Arise, live again!"

The only thing that Sologub opposes to "life, rough and poor" is a dream. In a dream, he overcomes "innate" decadence: the objective world is nothing, the subjective is everything. His positive characters are attracted by what is not in the world. 3. N. Gippius noted: "Dream and reality in eternal attraction and in eternal struggle - this is the tragedy of Sologub." Dream, art, beauty - his trinity formula, in which "art ... is the highest form of life." In his imagination, the artist created the happiest "country of love and peace" on the planet Oil, illuminated by the "beautiful star" Mair. The heroes of his prose also dream of living on this planet. The lyrical cycle Star Mair (1898-1901) is one of the most inspired in our poetry.

Sologub is a rare case of a long life in art without any visual evolution of ideological and aesthetic views - only the mastery of words has evolved. In his rich poetic heritage, infrequently, but rather bright verses are found: "Believe, the bloodthirsty idol will fall, / Our world will become free and happy ..."; "No, not only grief - / There is in the world ..." (1887, 1895). "O Rus! Exhausted in anguish, / I compose hymns to you. / There is no dearer land in the world, / O my homeland! .." - the heartfelt "Hymns to the Motherland" (1903), dating back to the poetic tradition of the 19th century, begin with these words. Nekrasov's motifs are recognizable, denouncing "humble little people" ("The Eighties", 1892), social inequality: "Here at the display window / Standing, admiring, a poor boy ..." (1892). There is a poetic confession in "faith in man", ending with the words: "And yet a joyful hope / There is a place in my heart!" ("I am also the son of a sick century ...", 1892). In Sologub, one can find Fetov-Bunin's declaration of love, in his words, for "living beauty" - nature:

And how joyful the sands are to me, The bushes, and the peaceful plain, And the clay, tender from moisture, And the colorful beetles.

("What is the sweetest thing in my life? ..", 1889)

However, this pathos rarely feeds Sologub's verse. His lyrical hero is characterized by the confession: "Oh death! I am yours. Everywhere I see / You alone - and I hate / Charms of the earth ..." (1894). His vision of life is conveyed by the detailed poetic metaphor "Devil's swing" (1907).

VF Khodasevich explained these contemporary paradoxes: "Sologub knows how to love life and admire it, but only as long as he contemplates it without regard to the "ladder of perfections"".

Sologub did not think of phenomena outside the dialectic of antinomic principles. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, he sees in their struggle the pledge of the "movement of things", the dramatic mode of life. I think this largely explains his shocking poetic throwing between light and darkness, God and Satan. "You, my father, I will glorify / As a reproach to an unrighteous day, / I will raise blasphemy over the world, / And seduce you" - this is how the lyrical hero Sologub addresses the Devil ("When I swam in a stormy sea ...", 1902). And he also claims:

Encroach on the truth of God - The same as to crucify Christ, Protect the Immaculate lips with earthly lies.

("I know with the last knowledge ..." from the collection "Incense", 1921)

Sologub's poetry is philosophical; it is difficult to find an analogy to the worldview expressed in it. As the author admitted, in verses he "opens his soul", and without attention to the warehouse of his soul, it is difficult to understand and love them. The seeming simplicity of this poetry of a limited range of ideas, without secondary importance, allegories, almost without metaphors, and the abundance of turns of the spoken language, the clarity of judgments, is striking. There are almost no complex epithets, the set of others is limited. Key words: tired, pale, poor, sick, angry, cold, quiet - determine the appropriate mood. Sologub's stanzas really resemble "crystals in severity<...>lines". What attracted their admirers, artists from I. Annensky to M. Gorky? First of all - the music of poetry and only then, probably, the original interpretation of the obvious and hidden paradoxes of life.

The structure-forming device of this poetry - "unadorned music" - is repetition. The author refers to it at different levels: thematic, lexical, sound. Many poems are in the nature of divination, spells. The latter can convince of the incredible, even of the "charm of death", "deliverer from an evil life. This is facilitated by rich rhyme, sophisticated metrics and stanza, an appeal - rare in Russian poetry - to a solid poetic form, triolet. As noted by V. Ya. Bryusov , in Sologub's rhyme, not only the supporting consonant, but also the previous vowel is agreed, and in the first volume of works "for 177 poems more than a hundred different meters and constructions of stanzas. " The poet himself, he understands what talent and "tireless work" was born "Sologubovskaya simplicity", calls it "Pushkin".

Sologub's poetry reflected his knowledge of history, literature, mythology, religion, science - culture in a broad sense. For this, he was "his own" for the acmeists.

At the overturned jug He looked back from paradise. In the desert, only one moment, And there the centuries flowed, burning.<...>

How long has dark Kazan

Was a haven of inspiration

And shook Euclid's edge

Our Lobachevsky, bright genius!

("On an overturned jug ...", 1923)

These stanzas were born from the author's "extraordinary interest" in the problems of the structure of the world, astronomy, the fourth dimension, the principle of relativity3. The impetus for poetic reflections on the limits of knowledge, the significance of Einstein's discoveries is the Muslim legend that in an earthly moment, during which the water did not have time to pour out of the vessel, the Prophet made his wonderful journeys, had 70 thousand conversations with Allah.

For a quarter of a century Sologub went to prosperity, the opportunity to devote himself to the main business. This was facilitated by the marriage with the writer Anastasia Chebotarevskaya in 1908. Their house became a literary salon, and the "seer" Sologub became a trendsetter. His poetry collections The Serpent: Poems, Book Six (1907), The Fiery Circle (1908), collections of short stories Decaying Masks (1907), The Book of Partings (1908), The Book of Enchantments (1909) are published. In 1913, a collection of works in 12 volumes was published, since 1913 a 20-volume collection of works began to appear (for a number of reasons, some volumes did not go out of print). But prosperity did not last long. After the October Revolution of 1917, Sologub fell into the category of semi-forbidden writers, whose worldview did not correspond to the "normative". In a relatively liberal period for publishing, his collections "The Sky is Blue", "One Love", "Cathedral Blagovest", "Incense" (all - 1921), "Road Fire", "Svirel", "The Magic Cup" (all -1922), "Great Blagovest" (1923). However, in the future, until the early 1990s, when Sologub's kishi began to appear in significant circulation, isolated cases of the publication of his lyrics and "Small Demon" were noted, while the novel was subjected to a vulgar sociological interpretation. On the whole, Sologub's work was assessed negatively, and the study of Sologub almost disappeared for seven decades.

(real name - Teternikov Fedor Kuzmich)

(1863-1927) Russian symbolist writer

Fedor's father was a St. Petersburg craftsman, a tailor who died of consumption, leaving a young son and daughter. Mother came from peasants and soon after the death of her husband began to work as a servant in the family of her acquaintances Agapovs. The upbringing of children was carried out in an old-fashioned way: they were beaten for the slightest reason. Surprisingly, the mother also cut off her adult son, up to the age of 28.

However, the owners raised Fedor and his sister Olga along with their children. They were intelligent and educated people who were interested in theater and music, and sometimes the boy even got a subscription to the opera from them. The Agapovs' house had a good library, which Fyodor was allowed to use, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, William Shakespeare's King Lear and Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote made the greatest impression on him.

Fyodor was often admitted to conversations of a historical and literary nature, and to children's parties. But the children teased him, the servant's son, and he keenly felt the inequality of the situation. Later, Fyodor Sologub will reflect his experiences in many poems and stories (for example, in the image of Grisha Igumnov from the story "Smile").

Thanks to his mother, Fedor was able to finish first the parish school, then the district school. In 1882, he graduated from a teacher's institute and freed his mother from hard day work.

He begins his teaching career in a remote province - in the town of Kresttsy, Novgorod province, where he goes full of Napoleonic plans to bring life into the school routine, the seeds of light and love - into children's hearts. However, at that time, any manifestation of fresh thought was perceived as dissent.

Later, in the novel "Heavy Dreams", begun in 1883 and published in 1896, Fyodor Sologub will show the atmosphere of slander, slander, and lies that reigned in provincial schools. His teaching activity in the province continued for ten years (in 1885 he moved to Velikie Luki, and then in 1889 to Vytegra, a county town in the Olonets region, where he taught at a teacher's seminary.) And all this time he fought against poverty, stupefying work and heavy despotic domestic oppression of the mother, which lasted until her death in 1892.

In letters to his sister, he shares his frankly fantastic plans for how he is going to get rich and break out of poverty: write a mathematics textbook in order to receive a cash bonus, win the lottery, organize a savings and loan bank for teachers.

All the years of his teaching career, Fedor Teternikov keeps a kind of lyrical diary. He describes the places where he lives, the customs of the inhabitants, their appearance, habits, way of life, drinking, love affairs.

Fyodor Sologub was distinguished by rare industriousness: during his forty-year creative life, he wrote about four thousand poems. However, although he published the first poem "The Fox and the Hedgehog" already in 1884 in the St. Petersburg magazine "Hedgehog", subsequent works were either not accepted or passed unnoticed.

The turning point in his life was 1892, when he managed to move to St. Petersburg. He got a job as a mathematics teacher at the Rozhdestvensky city school, and in 1899 he became a teacher, and then an inspector of the Andreevsky school and a member of the St. Petersburg district school council.

He retired only in 1907, and not of his own free will: he was not forgiven for the views that he expressed in the press on education.

In St. Petersburg, Fyodor Sologub immediately enters the literary environment, gets acquainted with the leaders of the new direction (symbolism) Dmitry Merezhkovsky and N. Minsky, begins to cooperate with the Severny Vestnik magazine, where he publishes his first story, Shadows. In the Symbolists' printed organ, he came up with a pseudonym, dropping one letter from the name of the famous writer V. Sollogub.

In terms of subject matter, the poems of Fyodor Sologub do not differ in variety; they can be conditionally designated as works about life and death. Contemporaries wrote about the simplicity and primitiveness of his poems, saw in them a simple response to events, but did not look for the depth of historical analogies and complex allusions, as, for example, in the poetry of Valery Bryusov.

The lyrical hero of the poet is possessed by moods of melancholy, hopelessness, impotence and confusion. “I am also the son of a sick age,” Sologub declares. The poetic vocabulary of the writer is unambiguous, it is dominated by such concepts as death, corpse, ashes, crypt, grave, funeral, darkness, gloom.

Bryusov noted that in the first volume of Fyodor Sologub, for 177 poems, there are more than 100 different meters and constructions of stanzas - a ratio that is unlikely to be found in any other contemporary poet. Academician V. Zhirmunsky, a researcher of poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, used Sologub's poems as poetic samples in his study "Composition of Lyric Poems".

Contemporaries noted the magical or incantatory connotation of the poet's poems. Sometimes they even talked about the satanic, diabolical beginning in the works of Sologub.

However, one cannot say that only pessimistic intonations are inherent in his work. He described the world that he saw, and characterized it factographically accurately.

In the novel The Petty Demon (1905), Fyodor Sologub described the world he knew well: the life of a provincial hinterland and its hero, the teacher Peredonov. In many respects following the traditions of Gogol, he exaggerates in a naturalistically accurate and at the same time symbolistically generalized manner, bringing to the grotesque the absurdity and pathology of all possible human manifestations. The image of the strange fantastic creature Nedotykomki has become a household name, embodying ignorance, vulgarity, stupidity.

The people in the image of Fyodor Sologub are deliberately ugly, depraved, petty and conceited, they are possessed by base feelings. They seek only to humiliate others or harm them. The name of Peredonov, proud of his ignorance, became, thanks to Sologub, a symbol of inertia and pathological stupidity.

The poet also expressed his attitude to modern education in his journalistic articles, which appeared in various St. Petersburg publications. He began publishing poems and political tales in satirical magazines.

Criminal prosecutions and court cases are even initiated against Fyodor Sologub.

A new period of the writer's work begins in 1907, when he loses his beloved sister, to whose memory he dedicates the poem "Devil's Swing", in which he claims that the world is ruled by a devilish force.

At the same time, Fyodor Sologub proceeds to the first novel of the trilogy "A Created Legend". He will name it "Drops of Blood". It was soon followed by the novels "Queen Ortrud" and "Smoke and Ashes". Sologub's main utopian dream appears in them, "a proud dream of the transformation of life by the power of creative art, of life created by a proud will." It resonates with themes that appeared in early poems, for example, the myth of the distant country of Oil, which can only be reached after death. So in the writer's work there is an idea of ​​death as one of the ways to resolve all life conflicts.

In parallel, he develops another myth - the myth of the sun-dragon. It is known that the ancients represented the sun as a living creature that runs away from a snake crawling across the sky. If the serpent catches up with the sun and swallows it, a solar eclipse occurs on earth. The world appears to Sologub as an eternal duel between good and evil, the latter usually winning. The personality is forced to submit to an evil fatal force, its freedom is illusory.

Fyodor Sologub turns to dramaturgy, one after another his plays The Victory of Death (1907), The Gift of the Wise Bees (1907), Love (1907), Night Dances (1908), Vaska Klyuchnik and Page Zhean (1908), which are successfully performed on the stages of St. Petersburg theaters.

The eighth book of poems, The Fiery Circle, published in 1908, is basically a collection of fifteen years written. Sologub demonstrates his understanding of the image-symbol: it must be clear in terms of semantics and at the same time carry the author's content. The writer combined his stories into the collections The Sting of Death (1904), The Decaying Masks (1907), The Book of Partings (1908), The Book of Enchantments (1909). The real and the conditional coexist side by side in them, sometimes it is even difficult to distinguish where and when the action takes place, in what environment, in a dream or in reality. The story “Shadows” (1896) can be considered indicative, in which the boy can hardly wait for the evening to start depicting various figures on the wall. Sologub with pedantic, almost protocol accuracy reproduces incomprehensible, painful incidents that are on the verge between reality and fantasy. Outwardly cold, devoid of emotions, the style was called by T. Mann "merciful cruelty."

In 1908, Fyodor Sologub married the writer A. Chebotarevskaya, who graduated from the Higher School of Social Sciences in Paris. She was the author of stories and translations, wrote articles on art.

In the former apartment of Sologub, according to the memoirs of Chulkov, the "Areopagus of St. Petersburg poets" gathered. Now A. Chebotarevskaya opens a literary salon in their house, where artists, actors, and politicians are received. Sologub becomes a teacher of life, a fashionable writer.

The events of the First World War are assessed by him from a chauvinistic position, now he speaks of self-sacrifice for the renewal of life. True, the book of poems "War" was not positively evaluated by critics.

Fyodor Sologub did not accept the October Revolution, it seemed to him that demonic forces had come out. He wanted the structure of the soul to change, so that people would become different. Since this did not happen, Sologub was about to leave Russia. 1921 was a year of loss for him: his wife committed suicide in a fit of melancholy, throwing herself into the Neva from the Tuchkov Bridge. Her body was found only in the spring, when the ice melted.

Despite internal opposition to the new regime, the writer continued to work: in 1923 his novel The Snake Charmer was published, poems and articles were published. Since 1926, Fyodor Sologub was the chairman of the Union of Leningrad Writers.

However, the disease took away his last strength, for many months he did not get up, he lived behind a dark closet, in the corner with his wife's relatives. In December 1927, Sologub died, remaining in the history of literature as a novelist, storyteller, playwright.

Descendants are faced with the task of studying his extensive creative heritage. After all, for many decades the name of Sologub was known mainly to specialists. And only recently his works began to be printed in mass editions.

The translation activity of Fyodor Sologub remains practically unexplored: he translated from Ukrainian, Bulgarian, German, Modern Greek, Polish, French, and English.